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Birds And Bankers

The other day, with the now homeless Occupiers still flooding the streets downtown, railing about bailed-out bankers, Henry Paulson, the former Treasury Secretary, Goldman Sachs C.E.O., and bailout architect, was uptown, taking a nature walk in Central Park. It was a drizzly day, and Paulson showed up at the Boathouse wearing a baggy suit and carrying a London Fog rain jacket. In person, he seems less like the “Superman” villain Lex Luthor, whom his grandchildren thinks he resembles, or William Hurt, who played him in “Too Big to Fail,” and more like a park ranger, full of jerky energy.

“My wife’s jealous,” Paulson said, of his walk in the Park. (His wife, Wendy, is a naturalist who led bird walks there when the couple lived nearby.) Spotting a logbook where visitors record bird sightings, he flipped through until he came to a good entry. “See, this is someone who knew what they were doing,” he said and read off the species: “Everything from a house finch to a tufted titmouse and an Eastern towhee.”

Paulson now lives in Chicago, where he runs the Paulson Institute, which focusses on U.S.-China relations. He’d been in town that week “to see Mike Bloomberg” (board meeting for Bloomberg’s charity) and to discuss the Latin America Conservation Council, a gathering of business leaders (Caterpillar, PepsiCo) whom Paulson had wrangled, along with Mark Tercek, his former Goldman protégé and the head of the Nature Conservancy.

Tercek, a tall man with dark hair and a kindergarten teacher’s demeanor, arrived at the Boathouse, too, along with E. J. McAdams, a Conservancy employee, and the three of them headed off for the Ramble. As they walked, they spouted facts about Latin America’s watersheds and rain forests. There weren’t many birds out, but the woods brought on ornithological flashbacks. Stopping near a small glade, Paulson recalled, “We were not far from here. There was a little ovenbird. A Cooper’s hawk came in right above. And the little bird froze for a while, froze and froze, and pretty soon—boom!” He was asked if there was a financial metaphor in this, and he joked, “I think of that bird as an innocent little banker. No, I don’t.”

Paulson is careful about making public pronouncements, given the lingering controversy over the bailout and the still vexing questions about Washington’s ties to Wall Street. While he expressed an understanding of anti-banker sentiment—“A lot of people are frustrated, and we’re going through a tough time economically, and we aren’t creating jobs like we should”—he added, “The easy quip is to say that Occupy Wall Street should be two hundred miles south.”

This being a nature walk, however, Paulson stuck to natural metaphors. Talking about financial-industry reforms, he brought up prairie restoration: “What you do is you cut out the alien species. You cut out the buckthorn, you burn. . . . You let the natural prairie grasses grow. We’ve got good regulation that we need, but there’s all kinds of stuff we don’t need.” Europe’s economic travails made him think of species extinction. “Predators, they’re the best coal miners’ canary,” he said, on the steps of Belvedere Castle, with a red-bellied woodpecker hammering in the background. “When they’re gone, you’ve got a sick ecosystem.” In other words, “You can’t have the problems that they’re having in Europe or elsewhere without it affecting banks” the world over. The lesson, Tercek added, was “interconnectedness.”

The drizzle turned into raindrops, and McAdams opened an umbrella. Paulson said, “After I left Treasury, I think in some ways it was harder to sit there and be writing my book . . . listening to all the criticism.” He doesn’t meet many hecklers, but he did have one bad encounter, about a year ago: “I was in the airport, and this guy kept staring at me. And he said, ‘Are you Hank Paulson, the Treasury Secretary?’ And I said, ‘Yes.’ And he said, ‘Do you really hate it when people come up to you like this?’ And I said, ‘Oh, no, people usually thank me or say something nice.’ And he looked at me, very perplexed, and said, ‘Yeah, I guess people try to be polite, don’t they?’ “

Near Bow Bridge, Paulson headed toward the western edge of the Park, where a car was waiting. “You know, I’m not looking for more friends at this point,” he said. “Everybody would rather be liked than not liked, but . . .” He trailed off. There was a stink in the air, and Paulson identified it: “Horse manure. I grew up on a farm—I know the smell of horse manure. It does smell better than pig manure.” He said goodbye to the conservationists and walked uphill to meet his driver.♦